116 music, philosophy, and modernity
comprehensible’ (Kant 1968 b:b 193,a 190). Freedom from determi-
nation is what counts in this kind of understanding; indeed, it is pre-
cisely thefailureof a certain kind of conceptual determination which
gives it its significance. The link between freedom from determination
and other ideas of freedom will be crucial in some of the philosophical
approaches to music which do not follow a Hegelian line.
In chapter 3 I linked the idea of schematism both to aesthetic ideas
and to Taylor’s notion of ‘preconceptual engagement’ with the world.
The kind of forms this engagement can take are also suggested by
the remarks from Wittgenstein. Some aspects of such pre-conceptual
engagement can be a form of immediacy that we assume animals possess
in varying degrees. However, the ways in which this engagement is man-
ifest in music involve a level of reflexivity that is both non-conceptual,
and yet highly differentiated. This level of reflexivity can transform a
form of engagement as basic, for example, as ‘anticipation’ into a com-
plex articulation that can in turn affect how we experience anticipation.
Wagner inspired a whole genre of dramatic music in this respect: think
of the part of the second act ofTristanwhich precedes the lovers’ meet-
ing, and of the way in which the musical gestures of this scene are
echoed in subsequent film and other music.^4 If this is an appropriate
way to think about music, it indicates one way in which we can ques-
tion Brandom’s use of the division between texts and things to support
his fact-based conception. Cavell has contended that knowing things is
not the only way to relate to them – one can paint them, evoke them
through music, etc. – and this perspective is neglected in Brandom’s
conception.^5
4 The phenomenology of anticipation is very often related to the functioning of tonality.
Susan McClary ( 2000 ) regards tonality of the kind that develops in the eighteenth century
as inherently ideological, relating it to the idea of the ‘centred self’ and of the disciplining
of the self in the name of deferring gratification, which she associates with the ‘Age of
Reason’ (see Bowie 2003 a for a critique of the philosophy behind such a position).
However, the ways in which tonality relates to fundamental ways of being in the world by
creating structures of anticipation and fulfilment, tension and relaxation seem to me not
just ideological. Nor is tonality just a form which instils discipline, not least because it can,
asTristanmakes very clear, be related to eroticism. One major reason that many of the
conventions of tonality become so important in modern music is that they make sense
of how it is to be in an affectively structured world, rather than just creating a deceptive
form of order. There is nothing natural about tonality, but the position which sees it as
inherently ideological is itself also making a contestable ideological claim.
5 Brandom does suggest that one might ‘eschew reductive explanations in semantics
entirely’ and one could ‘remain contented with describing the relations among a family
of mutually presupposing concepts – a family that includes representation, inference,
claiming, referring, and so on’ (Brandom 1994 : 669 ), but this still fails to expand the
frame of communicative practice in the way I suggest.